All Quotes by William Saroyan
“All things lie dark in possibility.”
“Genius is play, and man's capacity for achieving genius is infinite, and many may achieve genius only through play.”
“All I can do is write my stories for mankind, and rest easy.”
“I was a little afraid of him; not the boy himself, but of what he seemed to be: the victim of the world.”
“He was just a young man who'd come to town on a donkey, bored to death or something, who'd taken advantage of the chance to be entertained by a small-town kid who was bored to death, too. That's the only way I could figure it out without accepting the general theory that he was crazy.”
“Indians are born with an instinct for riding, rowing, hunting, fishing, and swimming. Americans are born with an instinct for fooling around with machines.”
“The race was over. I was last, by ten yards. Without the slightest hesitation I protested and challenged the runners to another race, same distance, back. They refused to consider my proposal, which proved, I knew, that they were afraid to race me. I told them they knew very well I could beat them.”
“There is little pride in writers. They know they are human and shall some day die and be forgotten. Knowing all this a writer is gentle and kindly where another man is severe and unkind.”
“It is impossible not to notice that our world is tormented by failure, hate, guilt, and fear.”
“I began to write in the first place because I expected everything to change, and I wanted to have things in writing the way they had been. Just a little things, of course. A little of my little.”
“One day in the afternoon of the world, glum death will come and sit in you, and when you get up to walk, you will be as glum as death, but if you're lucky, this will only make the fun better and the love greater.”
“What the hell are they all looking for? A way out. A way to the right way out. A way to leave. A way to go. A way to have had it, to have had enough of it, to be done with it. A decent way to give it all over to the giver of it all.”
“What a lonely and silly thing it is to be an Armenian writer in America.”
“I sometimes think that rich men belong to another nationality entirely, no matter what their actual nationality happens to be. The nationality of the rich.”
“The writer is a spiritual anarchist, as in the depth of his soul every man is. He is discontented with everything and everybody. The writer is everybody's best friend and only true enemy — the good and great enemy. He neither walks with the multitude nor cheers with them. The writer who is a writer is a rebel who never stops.”
“Every man alive in the world is a beggar of one sort or another, every last one of them, great and small. The priest begs God for grace, and the king begs something for something. Sometimes he begs the people for loyalty, sometimes he begs God to forgive him. No man in the world can have endured ten years without having begged God to forgive him.”
“I saw rich beggars and poor beggars, proud beggars and humble beggars, fat beggars and thin beggars, healthy beggars and sick beggars, whole beggars and crippled beggars, wise beggars and stupid beggars. I saw amateur beggars and professional beggars. A professional beggar is a beggar who begs for a living.”
“One of us is obviously mistaken.”
“I am interested in madness. I believe it is the biggest thing in the human race, and the most constant. How do you take away from a man his madness without also taking away his identity? Are we sure it is desirable for a man's spirit not to be at war with itself, or that it is better to be serene and ready to go to dinner than to be excited and unwilling to stop for a cup of coffee, even?”
“The people you hate, well, this is the question about such people: why do you hate them?”
“Everything and everybody is sooner or later identified, defined, and put in perspective. The truth as always is simultaneously better and worse than what the popular myth-making has it.”
“Everybody has to die, but I always believed an exception would be made in my case. Now what?”
“The role of art is to make a world which can be inhabited.”
“Standing at the edge of our city, a man could feel that we had made this place of streets and dwellings in the stillness of the desert, and that we had done a brave thing... Or a man could feel that we had made this city in the desert and that it was a fake thing and that our lives were empty lives, and that we were the contemporaries of the jack rabbits.”
“I don't think my writing is sentimental, although it is a very sentimental thing to be a human being.”
“Art is what is irresistible.”
“The most solid advice for a writer is this, I think: Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.”
“Through the air on the flying trapeze, his mind hummed. Amusing it was, astoundingly funny. A trapeze to God, or to nothing, a flying trapeze to some sort of eternity; he prayed objectively for strength to make the flight with grace.”
“Then swiftly, neatly, with the grace of the young man on the trapeze, he was gone from his body. For an eternal moment he was still all things at once: the bird, the fish, the rodent, the reptile, and man. An ocean of print undulated endlessly and darkly before him. The city burned. The herded crowd rioted. The earth circled away, and knowing that he did so, he turned his lost face to the empty sky and became dreamless, unalive, perfect.”
“If you can't write a decent short story because of the cold, write something else. Write anything. Write a long letter to somebody.”
“What I intended to do was to burn a half dozen of my books and keep warm, so that I could write my story, but when I looked around for titles to burn, I couldn't find any.”
“There is much for a young writer to learn from our poorest writers. It is very destructive to burn bad books, almost more destructive than to burn good ones.”
“This was such bad writing that it was good.”
“It seemed to me that I had no right to burn a book I hadn't even read.”
“I couldn't understand the language, I couldn't understand a word in the whole book, but it was somehow too eloquent to use for a fire.”
“The only thing I can talk about is the cold because it is the only thing going on today.”
“A man must pretend not to be a writer.”
“I am out here in the far West, in San Francisco, in a small room on Carl Street, writing a letter to common people, telling them in simple language what they already know.”
“If I have any desire at all, it is to show the brotherhood of man.”
“This is a big statement and it sounds a little precious. Generally a man is ashamed to make such a statement. He is afraid sophisticated people will laugh at him. But I don't mind. I'm asking sophisticated people to laugh. That is what sophistication is for.”
“I see life as one life at one time, so many millions simultaneously, all over the earth.”
“Babies who have not yet been taught to speak any language are the only race of the earth, the race of man: all the rest is pretence, what we call civilization, hatred, fear, desire for strength.”
“If I want to do anything, I want to speak a more universal language.”
“This is what drives a young writer out of his head, this feeling that nothing is being said.”
“But try to remember that a good man can never die. You will see your brother many times again-in the streets, at home, in all the places of the town. The person of a man may go, but the best part of him stays. It stays forever.”
“It is the heart of man that I am trying to imply in this work.”
“I have a faint idea what it is like to be alive.”
“Everything begins with inhale and exhale, and never ends.”
“Every man in the world is better than someone else and not as good as someone else.”
“I began to visit Armenia as soon as I had earned the necessary money.”
“I love Armenian people — all of them. I love them because they are a part of the enormous human race, which of course I find simultaneously beautiful and vulnerable.”
“It is simply in the nature of Armenian to study, to learn, to question, to speculate, to discover, to invent, to revise, to restore, to preserve, to make, and to give.”
“There was a touch of anxiety in the whole human race about its future.”
“There is a small area of land in Asia Minor that is called Armenia, but it is not so. It is not Armenia. It is a place. There are only Armenians, and they inhabit the earth, not Armenia, since there is no Armenia. There is no America and there is no England, and no France, and no Italy. There is only the earth.”
“A man's ethnic identity has more to do with a personal awareness than with geography.”
“I believe there are ways whose ends are life instead of death.”
“I have been to the place, Armenia. There is no nation there, but that is all the better. But I have been to that place, and I know this: that there is no nation in the world, no England and France and Italy, and no nation whatsoever.”
“My uncle jumped up from the desk, loving him more than he loved any other man in the world, and through him loving the lost nation, the multitude dead, and the multitude living in every alien corner of the world.”
“When Andranik went away... I saw that tears were in his eyes and his mouth was twisting with agony like the mouth of a small boy who is in great pain but will not let himself cry.”
“It's all over. We can begin to forget Armenia now. Andranik is dead. The nation is lost. I'm no Armenian. I'm an American. Well, the truth is I am both and neither. I love Armenia and I love America and I belong to both, but I am only this: an inhabitant of the earth, and so are you, whoever you are. I tried to forget Armenia but I couldn't do it.”
“You write a hit play the same way you write a flop.”
“The greatest happiness you can have is knowing that you do not necessarily require happiness.”
“I took to writing at an early age to escape from meaninglessness, uselessness, unimportance, insignificance, poverty, enslavement, ill health, despair, madness, and all manner of other unattractive, natural and inevitable things.”
“I care so much about everything that I care about nothing.”
“The whole world and every human being in it is everybody's business.”
“My superficial manners stink and my profound manners are almost as bad.”
“All great art has madness, and quite a lot of bad art has it, too.”
“Good people are good because they've come to wisdom through failure. We get very little wisdom from success, you know.”
“The business of polishing my shoes satisfies my soul.”
“The purpose of my life is to put off dying as long as possible.”
“The purpose of writing is both to keep up with life and to run ahead of it. I am little comfort to myself, although I am the only comfort I have, excepting perhaps streets, clouds, the sun, the faces and voices of kids and the aged, and similar accidents of beauty, innocence, truth and loneliness.”
“Poetry must be read to be poetry. It may be that one reader is all that I deserve. If this is so, I want that reader to be you.”
“I have managed to conceal my madness fairly effectively, and as far as I know it hasn't hurt anybody badly, for which I am grateful.”
“In the end, today is forever, yesterday is still today, and tomorrow is already today.”
“I am deeply opposed to violence in all its forms, and yet I myself am violent in spirit, in my quarrel with the unbeatable: myself, my daemon, God, the human race, the world, time, pain, disorder, disgrace and death.”
“I have made a fiasco of my life, but I have had the right material to work with.”
“Go ahead. Fire your feeble guns. You won't kill anything. There will always be poets in the world.”
“I am enormously wise and abysmally ignorant.”
“I believe that time, with its infinite understanding, will one day forgive me.”
“There is only good and bad art.”
“Nothing has ever been more sure-fire than truth and integrity.”
“I believe in my work and am eager for others to know about it.”
“It is better to be a good human being than to be a bad one. It is just naturally better.”
“The child race is fresh, eager, interested, innocent, imaginative, healthy and full of faith, where the adult race, more often than not, is stale, spiritually debauched, unimaginative, unhealthy, and without faith.”
“Art comes from the world, belongs to it, can never escape from it.”
“A play is a world, with its own inhabitants and its own laws and its values.”
“Don't forget that some things count more than other things.”
“Each person belongs to the environment, in his own person, as himself.”
“Art can no longer afford to be contemptuous of politics, and it appears to be time politics took a little instruction from art.”
“The weakness of art is that great poems do not ennoble politics, as they certainly should, and the trouble with politics is that they inspire poets only to mockery and scorn.”
“Art and politics must move closer together. Reflection and action must be equally valid in good men if history is not to take one course and art an other.”
“Wars, for us, are either inevitable, or created. Whatever they are, they should not wholly vitiate art. What art needs is greater men, and what politics needs is better men.”
“Art and religion would not be able to stop the war any more than they would be able to stop tomorrow.”
“My work has always been the product of my time.”
“We didn't say anything because there was such an awful lot to say, and no language to say it in.”
“Now, having a play on the same bill with a play by the one and only, the good and great, the impish and noble, the man and superman, George Bernard Shaw, is for me an honor, and I think a most fitting thing.”
“I have read Schopenhauer at the age of twelve with no bewilderment and no contempt of his contempt for the world and its strange inhabitants, and no contempt for the strange inhabitant himself.”
“Now, if Mr. Shaw and Mr. Saroyan are poles apart, no comparison between the two, one great and the other nothing, one a genius and the other a charlatan, let me repeat that if you must know which writer has influenced my writing when influences are real and for all I know enduring, then that writer has been George Bernard Shaw. I shall in my own day influence a young writer or two somewhere or other, and no one need worry about that. Young Shaw, hello out there.”
“Their singing wasn't particularly good, but the feeling with which they sang was not bad at all.”
“Mrs. Sandoval," Homer said swiftly, "your son is dead. Maybe it's a mistake. Maybe it wasn't your son. Maybe it was somebody else. The telegram says it was Juan Domingo. But maybe the telegram is wrong.”
“Everything is changed — for you. But it is still the same, too. The loneliness you feel has come to you because you are no longer a child. But the whole world has always been full of that loneliness. The loneliness does not come from the War. The War did not make it. It was the loneliness that made the War.”
“You must remember always to give, of everything you have. You must give foolishly even. You must be extravagant. You must give to all who come into your life. Then nothing and no one shall have power to cheat you of anything, for if you give to a thief, he cannot steal from you, and he himself is then no longer a thief. And the more you give, the more you will have to give.”
“Everything alive is part of each of us, and many things which do not move as we move are part of us. The sun is part of us, the earth, the sky, the stars, the rivers, and the oceans. All things are part of us, and we have come here to enjoy them and to thank God for them.”
“How did money ever happen? What's it mean? What's it for?”
“You act as if you know more than I'll ever know, but I've forgotten more than you'll ever know. You're snobs, too. Every man I've ever met has been a snob. You don't have to be a snob, too, do you? Please sign this piece of paper, so I can be a member of the public library and read books and find out about people. I don't want to hate you, I just can't help it.”
“He knew the truth and was looking for something better.”
“There's a pretty woman for ever lucky man in the world: every man in the world is a lucky man if he only knew it, so why waste time?”
“Jim Dandy waves his stick over and around about the rock in a meaningless-meaningful way.”
“I had three secrets and sold them all.”
“We know more than we need to know.”
“Somewhere among every man's ancestors is a prince or a lord, a priest or a saint, and don't forget it. Wake up! Inherit the wealth of your ancestors!.. Stop living like a mouse, live like the rich people do.”
“One nickel, one secret. No exchanges, no refunds.”
“I was an old man by the time I took that walk to the Public Library in San Francisco, because the years between birth and twenty are the years in which the soul travels farthest and swiftest.”
“Neither love nor hate, nor any order of intense adherence to personal involvement in human experience, may be so apt to serve the soul as this freedom and this necessity to be kind.”
“My illness is life itself.”
“Illness must be considered to be as natural as health.”
“Illness is essentially discomfort, and it is not easy for anybody to be comfortable all the time... in his body, in his work, in his house, or in his soul.”
“I had in my soul the greatest truths to tell, but when I came to the work of telling them I couldn't do it.”
“I can't hate for long. It isn't worth it.”
“A man cannot write a poem or a story that will transform the whole nature of man, his reality and his truth, making them greater and nobler.”
“The streets made me, and the streets stink, but I love them, for I was born in them out of flesh and I was born in them out of spirit.”
“I loved the theaters, and even though I was hungry, I never spent money for food.”
“The world was my home and I was glad to be in it.”
“I believe there are ways whose ends are life instead of death.”
“I do not know what makes a writer, but it probably isn't happiness.”
“The order I found was the order of disorder.”
“What is a street? It is where the living weep, where the dead go off in silence to their peace.”
“My writing is careless, but all through it is something that is good, that is mine alone, that no other writer could ever achieve.”
“Boredom was the plague of my childhood. While I was at the orphanage, the boredom came from being in a place I did not wish to be. I was bored. I was bored the entire four years I was there.”
“Many friendships are swift and accidental, the result of a chance meeting, followed by a permanent separation.”
“Nobody seemed to be interested in anything except making money.”
“In the most commonplace, tiresome, ridiculous, malicious, coarse, crude, or even crooked people or events I had to seek out rare things, good things, comic things, and I did so.”
“Love of the streets is the love out of which I see deeply I love God, how near I come to the truth.”
“The end of life evokes the errors of it, and a fellow wishes he had known better.”
“A writer wants what he has to say to be heard again and again. He wants it to be heard after he is dead.”
“At his best, things do not happen to the artist; he happens to them.”
“Merely to survive is to keep the hope greatness, accuracy, and the grace alive.”
“The real story can never be told. It is untellable. The real (as real) is inaccessible, being gone in time. There is no point in glancing at the past, in summoning it up, in re-examining it, except on behalf of art — that is, the meaningful-real.”
“In order to write all a man needs is paper and a pencil. Furthermore, when a thing has been written, it is written forever. When it is printed, nothing can stop it from being printed again and again if the thing wants to be printed again and again. I must therefore be a writer.”
“I am an estranged man, said the liar: estranged from myself, from my family, my fellow man, my country, my world, my time, and my culture. I am not estranged from God, although I am a disbeliever in everything about God excepting God indefinable, inaccessible, inside all and careless of all.”
“Three times in my life I have been captured: by the orphanage, by school, and by the Army. I was four years in the orphanage, seven or eight in school, and three in the Army. Each seemed forever, though. But I'm mistaken. The fact is I was captured only once, when I was born, only that capture is also setting free, which is what this is actually all about. The free prisoner.”
“In those days, there was something more to the world than there is now. Well, my kids were little, let's put it that way, and of course if you like your kids, if you love them from the moment they begin, you yourself begin all over again, in them, with them, and so there is something more to the world again.”
“Armenag Saroyan. A good man of whom the worst that anybody was willing to say, was that he was too good for this world.”
“If the great one found out about my fight with Death, and came to be near me, what good things we might all expect from being in the world. and then around daybreak I knew I had come through, and now at last fell into real sleep — alone, and proud, and alive — now more alive than ever.”
“I was four years old, and had long since reasoned that it was folly to expect the big things from people. It was enough to get the little things. The biggest thing, of course, was love, the nearness of somebody you love when you need somebody to be near.”
“Armenag Saroyan was the failed poet, the failed Presbyterian preacher, the failed American, the failed theological student.”
“I have always been a laugher, disturbing people who are not laughers, upsetting whole audiences at theatres… I laugh, that's all. I love to laugh. Laughter to me is being alive. I have had rotten times, and I have laughed through them. Even in the midst of the very worst times I have laughed.”
“I had long known that there was something about me that was either violent or frightening for some reason. In certain three-sided clothing store images I had for some years come upon myself, with shock and disbelief, regret, and shame, disappointment and despair, for I am indeed clearly violent, mad, and ugly, all because of intensity of some kind, a tension, an obsession with getting everything that there was to be got, a passion, an insanity.”
“The idiot is indeed the good man, but only because he doesn't know any better.”
“Jesus never said anything about absurdity, and he never indicated for one flash of time that he was aware of the preposterousness of his theory about himself. And he didn't even try to make the theory understandable in terms of the reality and experience of the rest of us. For if everybody else is also not what Jesus said he was, what good is what he said?”
“The boy on the Oakland porch goes to sleep upon the universe of ice and wakes up and remembers the death of his father and mother, and sees the sun.”
“I have been vitally aware of the Law of Opposites, and this awareness has kept me reasonably serene... the drama of life... the play of truth. the quarrel of fools and frauds, male and female, the classic and the romantic, the disciplined and the free... the comic and the tragic contrasting of the opposites in all areas of possibility and on and on and on.”
“My work is writing, but my real work is being.”
“To remember something or to invent something, it comes to the same thing.”
“I did my best, and let me urge you to do your best, too. Isn't it the least we can do for one another?”
“Going around the world on a bicycle is no longer enough -- the daredevil has got to go around the moon on a Pogo stick with one arm tied behind him if he wants to get his picture in the paper.”
“I was afraid I might actually know him, might have known him, one of perhaps three hundred Fresno boys I had known thirty years ago, because if I *did* know him, I would have to make something of it, and this just wasn't the time for it.”
“Before the cat tastes the fish, his whiskers must feel the head.”
“A prudent man does not open an umbrella for one drop of rain.”
“The bicycle is a city thing, virtually useless anywhere excepting on a pavement or hard surface of some kind. Without the road it would never have been invented. It is a little mad, both in design and purpose. Two wheels held together in a frame, with a simple mechanical system enabling a forward movement for one person.”
“Cowards are the nicest people, the most interesting, the gentlest, the most refined, the least likely to commit crimes.”
“Cowards are nice, they're interesting, they're gentle, they wouldn't think of shooting down people in a parade from a tower. They want to live, so they can see their kids. They're very brave.”
“'Aram Sevavor, I came for advice about a private matter. I came all the way from my house on L Street to your house on Van Ness Avenue, past the place where they have those red fire engines, all the way up Eye Street, where the police have their building, all the way up Forthcamp Avenue, I came, Aram Sevavor, one foot after the other, from my house to your house, I came, and now I go, I go all the way back, Aram Sevavor, because I can't remember the question I came to ask.'”
“In the tradition of popular oratory, Trash [a nickname] started a talk at random, moved confidently ahead in no particular direction, and, although he spoke very clearly, said nothing.”